Using a home PC without an internet connection in the 90s, I would basically do laps of the entire OS, looking at every app/window/dialog, searching for novel stuff. That's what exploring one of these feels like!
What I'd really like to see, is Apple and Microsoft dedicating at least 1 person each (or even just part of their time), to meaningfully engage with the retro community about their company's older operating systems. Maybe fix some old bugs or write/port some newer apps to those OSes... or teach how to code/debug with period-correct software... something, anything, would be most welcome.
As a long time apple fan, Copland and what may have been occupies far more of my mind than is reasonable. But I never thought I’d actually get a chance to touch it. This is awesome to see.
It's crazy that an emulated version of a famously-buggy alpha OS running in a browser is more responsive than the host OS, but there you go. These Copland windows open at lightning speed in comparison to Golden Gate.
Didn't system 7 have virtual memory, at least for systems with a MMU? I seem to recall some applications that wouldn't run if it was enabled and also wouldn't run if you didn't have enough available ram, but I don't think I understood how to actually close applications on Mac when I ran into these... I certainly didn't know how to selectively run only the extensions needed either.... sometimes I managed to get whatever game to run on the macs in the middle school computer lab, but mostly I didn't, and had to spend the lunch period looking through cd-rom encylopedias instead.
Mac OS 7 “Virtual Memory” was just the swap file. Fundamentally classic Mac OS had a flat memory layout with special hooks defined that did not allow for virtual memory as more commonly defined. Multiprocessing came in asymmetric and symmetric forms but really wasn’t terribly useful until 8.5/8.6 and later but by that time Mac OS X was about to show up which solved all these issues.
I was really curious to see what Gerbils! is in the Applications folder, but that just triggers a hard lock up after the splash screen. I see the menus are "Environment", "Rendering" and "Camera" though.
Gerbils! is a demo app for QuickDraw 3D where gerbils are racing on a roller coaster track (or similar…it’s been a few decades). It existed for classic Mac OS too (I remember playing it on a 6100)
Very cool, I've been using macos so long but am also young enough to forget & finding it surprising just how long that monochrome watch pointer has been around.
Its fun playing around and seeing how much has stayed the same in desktops since then, and so far the most surprising thing to me was that a scrollable text area does not re-render the text as you move the scroll bar with your mouse
Totally makes sense that it wouldn't be worth the cycles back then, but its one of the few things that was actually surprising to me today
I got this working a few years ago on era-appropriate hardware. It was awful -- unstable and crashy. There were glimpses of what they were trying for, but it was painfully obvious they were a long way from even the stability of 7.5. I'm sure it was a tough call, but whoever decided to axe it made the right one. Besides, if it had succeeded, they might not have bought NeXT and we might not have gotten OS X!
Based on what has been reported, I don’t think it was all that tough a call to axe it. What to do after that has hard but cancelling Copeland was an obvious decision to make.
I was at WWDC in 1996. Each presentation showing off a new feature of Copeland required booting a custom build of the binary, and even then it was flakey as hell because it didn't implement proper memory protection. I vividly remember getting a sudden realisation that Copeland was never going to ship.
When Apple showed Copland on Computer Chronicles, it was just the Apple guy playing animated mock-up demos and pretending that he was using the computer. I think that shows an incredible lack of confidence, as they weren't even willing to demonstrate the actual OS in a controlled environment. I'm not sure why Computer Chronicles let them get away with this. I would have expected that as a news program, they wouldn't let guests do fake demos. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRKzJMS6Uw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXfsAYUjvms&t=242s
Copland is such an interesting glimpse into an alternate future. One where Apple got its early-90s management problems sufficiently under control, to transition classic MacOS into a modern operating system without adopting the full NeXT lineage
> DingusPPC does not take patches written with the help of AI, so maybe someone wants to re-do these fixes based on the explanations in the commit messages. (The patches for this wasm version are on this branch.)
One interesting outcome of Apple going with NeXT instead of being able to deliver Copland or failing to agree with Gassé on Be's acquisition, is that both platforms were heavily based on C++, and following Apple's culture, very little UNIX into them.
So who knows if Apple would have managed to make it, without Jobs, or the UNIX to sell to Linux folks that wanted a shinny laptop back in 2000's, to the point I have attended FOSDEM editions where that was more macOS than GNU/Linux on the corridors.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 38.7 ms ] thread(and also, how cool is it that we can run whole computers in our web browsers, just like that!)
https://infinitemac.org/
What about the enterprise version (https://lain.wiki/images/5/53/CoplandOS.png), though? :^)
For those who don’t know it was Apple’s port to Intel before they decided that PPC was the way forward after m68k.
Didn't system 7 have virtual memory, at least for systems with a MMU? I seem to recall some applications that wouldn't run if it was enabled and also wouldn't run if you didn't have enough available ram, but I don't think I understood how to actually close applications on Mac when I ran into these... I certainly didn't know how to selectively run only the extensions needed either.... sometimes I managed to get whatever game to run on the macs in the middle school computer lab, but mostly I didn't, and had to spend the lunch period looking through cd-rom encylopedias instead.
Its fun playing around and seeing how much has stayed the same in desktops since then, and so far the most surprising thing to me was that a scrollable text area does not re-render the text as you move the scroll bar with your mouse
Totally makes sense that it wouldn't be worth the cycles back then, but its one of the few things that was actually surprising to me today
Oh goodie! Another fork for my fork collection :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN3U3QCwL9g&list=PLOOjdnfSl3...
So who knows if Apple would have managed to make it, without Jobs, or the UNIX to sell to Linux folks that wanted a shinny laptop back in 2000's, to the point I have attended FOSDEM editions where that was more macOS than GNU/Linux on the corridors.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727434